The Onion: Nate Orenstam: Who Says Java Programmers Don’t Have A Sense Of Humor?: About an hour later, while Tim was using the “facilities,” I went in and changed the classpath on his computer, resulting in a confounding stream of ClassNotFoundExceptions. It took poor Tim a couple of minutes to figure out what the heck was going on. All the while, I was in the next cubicle, laughing my Dockers off.

Jim Carrey will loom large in our shattered posterity, I believe, because his filmography amounts to a uniquely sustained engagement with the problem of the self. Who knows how the self became such a problem, or when we began to feel the falseness in our nature? “There’s another man within me, that’s angry with me,” wrote Sir Thomas Browne in Religio Medici, three and a half centuries before the scene in Liar Liar where the hero stuffs his own head into the toilet bowl. Other clowns have risen since Carrey first stormed the multiplexes with Ace Ventura: Pet Detective–Will Ferrell, Adam Sandler, Ben Stiller, Seth Rogen–but for more than a decade now, he has been the go-to guy for high-concept metaphysics, for Hollywood’s sci-fi of the self. How about … an insurance salesman who discovers that his whole life is an elaborate fiction created by a malign TV producer?! Or–yeah!–a mendacious lawyer compelled to tell the truth for 24 hours?! Or even a blacklisted screenwriter (The Majestic) who loses his memory and wakes up to find that everybody thinks he’s a war hero?!

“The musicians I knew had gone through that transition … I’m listening to Bob Dylan … and I realize these artists are using their talent to project their feelings and ideas… not just please people … I was in the wrong place. In 1967 … I was thirty. I was entertaining people in nightclubs who were forty. They were at war with their kids who were twenty. There was a generation war. I was in the middle of it. I said ‘what the fuck am I doing over here?’ [The twenty year olds] are the people who will understand me and give me a chance … I took two years to change and it happened on television … happened on … shows like Della Reese, Virgina Graham and Steve Allen,” He added, “Virginia Graham was a real shit stirrer. She just loved to get me to talk about smoking pot and Henry Mancini… she got Henry Mancini to cop out to being a pot smoker on TV … I went on there … my beard was growing … my attitudes … were changing. And I talked about my changes on the panel… a lot.”